Murray Mednick

Murray Mednick
Murray Mednick
Born	1939; Brooklyn, New York
Occupation	playwright
Years active	1965 - present

Murray Mednick is a playwright. Born in 1939 to a family with Jewish roots, Mednick attended Brooklyn College and lived in Brooklyn and the Catskills before moving to Los Angeles in 1974.

In addition to his writing, Mednick served as a teacher at La Verne College. In 1978 he established a long-running summer workshop called the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop. In 2001, Padua Playwrights premiered three Mednick works as part of a tribute series honoring influential local playwrights.

Mednick has been mentioned as influencing other playwrights including Sam Shepard, Eduardo Machado, and David Scott Milton.

And he has a fourteen year old daughter, Celene Mednick, adopted from China.

Works

Mednick's works include an autobiographical series "16 Routines", "Joe and Betty" (concerning his parents' difficult marriage, performed in New York starting in June 2002), and "Mrs. Feuerstein", as well as "Sand", "The Hawk", and "The Coyote Cycles", a series of one-act plays involving four characters such as Spider Grandmother drawn from traditional Native American folklore. The Coyote character was also featured in "Destruction of the Fourth World", part of the 2009 series performed by Padua Playwrights.

Mednick is also credited as writer for the 2005 movie "Girl on a Bed".

Awards and recognition

Mednick is the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, several Bay Area Critics Awards, two LA Weekly Playwriting Awards (for Dictator and Fedunn), the American Theater Critics Association/Steinberg New Play Citation (for Joe and Betty), an Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award from Theatre LA for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles Theatre, a Local Hero Garland Award from Back Stage West for a Distinguished Body of Work, a Career Achievement Award from the LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s most prestigious honor, The Margaret Harford Award for “Sustained Excellence in Theater.” His work "The Deerkill" was highly regarded when it ran as an entry in The American College Theater Festival in the early seventies; Mednick provided on-site guidance for the director, Gil Lazier, and cast of Florida State University School of Theatre students.